


Bunker!Verse

by todisturbtheuniverse



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 8x13: Everybody Hates Hitler, Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-12
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 01:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/681077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/todisturbtheuniverse/pseuds/todisturbtheuniverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's not answering." Allow me to fill in what Dean Winchester's prayers consisted of, and add some brotherly comfort along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Faith

**Author's Note:**

> (Update on 3/18/2014: Aggressively consolidated into one file, instead of spread across a series.)
> 
> Dean’s been worried about Castiel since Samandriel. Angst, fluff, heavily implied pre-slash Dean/Cas, and the king of comfort, Sam, giving us all warm and fuzzies by being supportive. Little ficlet tagged for 8x13, not very plotty, just extrapolation (and vague, unsupported hopes about an eminent return of the sassiest angel in the garrison).

It’s a while before Dean tries to call Cas.

He wants the angel to flutter back on his own—come back from Heaven and check in, let them know what’s going on. He knows in his gut it won’t happen, but in the silence of motel room after motel room, just when he thinks his lips will form the words, he tells himself that Cas will turn up tomorrow.

It’s not until they unlock that damn bunker that he finally gives in. It’s been weeks; Cas isn’t coming back. Not unless he says something. And even if his words don’t do a damn thing—because what if Cas can’t come back?—at least Cas will hear him. Like he did in Purgatory. At least Cas will know he hasn’t been forgotten.

He just can’t shake the image of the blood dripping down Cas’s cheek, the blank emptiness behind those blue eyes, the dark undercurrent of something bad, something wrong.

He’s got his own room in this big empty place, and it’s weird hearing Sam’s snores at a distance. It’s hard to sleep, actually, with his brother more than five feet away. He sits on the edge of his bed, boxers and t-shirt and socks—it’s cold down here, they didn’t get the heating quite right in the 1950s—and takes a deep breath, scrubs a hand over his hair, clears his throat.

“Cas,” he says finally, and imagines the sound of wings for a long, quiet moment that just goes on, echoing with its emptiness. “Can you…” He clears his throat again, because it’s hard to say. Always has been. “Look, it’s important. Please. Can you just…flap down here for a minute?”

Nothing.

“Cas.” And he gets up, because he can’t sit still, the words coming out of him in a flood. “Son of a bitch. You can’t do this, man. You can’t go flapping off to Heaven anymore and not check in with us. Not after…” He thinks back on that conversation and shudders. “I can’t get to you there, unless you want me to put a bullet in my brain and hope that you can clean up the mess afterwards. I can’t look for you. This isn’t Purgatory.” He runs a hand over his jaw because he wishes it was, still longs for the purity of that place in the moments when humanity overwhelms him. “This better not be Purgatory,” he threatens. “If you’ve got anything big and horrible on your ass, stop trying to protect me from it and bring it where I can fight it.”

The silence drips, big and oppressive, and the hopelessness closes in on his chest. He doesn’t say anything else—can’t, feels like—just sits back down with his head in his hands and the vague undercurrent of panic in his veins, trying to think of what to do, trying to know what to do, but there’s no protocol for this.

“Help me out, man,” he whispers, but Cas doesn’t come.

 

Next time he tries to call Cas, he goes outside. Maybe there’s some voodoo magic on the bunker that keeps it away from prying angel eyes and ears; if the idiots were keepin’ angel feathers in their labs then they had to know the armies of Heaven were out there.

So he’s outside, his breath misting in the chilly night air, and he opens on that.

“Still confused about the feathers, man.” He rubs his arms to warm them, even though the cold’s in a place he can’t reach. “I don’t…” He pauses, frowning. “You never told me. Why was there a bag of fucking angel feathers in the trunk of my car? Are they yours?” Even contemplating the idea is kind of appalling. “Because, dude, I’m okay with you being in the car, but if you’re just molting in the backseat, that’s kind of a problem. I have a very strict no-feathers-no-fur policy for my baby.”

He doesn’t expect anything other than the silence, but it’s still chilling.

“I should’ve told you,” he mutters. “You did a lot of crazy things, Cas, and some of ‘em still…but it was always for me. Dying, killing your own brothers, Falling. Because I asked. And I never said thanks, and…I should’ve told you. You’ve done everything for us. Always happy to bleed for the Winchesters.” He’d hated it when Cas said that; it still made him grit his teeth in something like regret. “Maybe it’s time you stop bleedin’,” he says gruffly, voice catching in his throat. “Just come home. We’ve kind of got a place now. I think. Won’t be tons of motel rooms anymore, I hope. I kind of like it here. Think you would, too. Quiet. Lots of books. Sam’s nerdgasming every five minutes.” He snorts, but really, he’s happy, happy that his little brother finally has something worth getting excited over.

“But you’ve gotta turn up first, man,” he said finally. “Please, just. If you’re okay, you’ve gotta at least tell me.”

He sits outside all night, but Cas never shows.

 

When Dean leaves to check in with Garth and Kevin, Sam prays.

He’s heard it, Dean shifting around at night, from room to room, his voice a long, slow roll until he can’t be understanding anymore, and that’s when he shouts and throws things, and Sam hears a lot of thumps and a lot of things breaking. In the morning it’s always hard to tell what’s missing—Dean cleans up carefully; maybe he thinks Sam can’t hear him.

And Sam thinks—if Cas can hear Dean and he’s not coming, then Sam’s not going to be any more convincing, but he still has to try. He can’t do anything else.

“Hey, Cas,” he says, and he fiddles with the tumbler of whiskey that he’s not really drinking. “We miss you. And we’re worried. You probably already know that,” and he chuckles, sadly, “the way Dean’s been. And if you’re not showing up after…after all that, it’s gotta be pretty bad, right?” He pauses and takes a swallow of the stuff anyway. In solidarity, he thinks, ironically, because his brother’s an alcoholic and it’s been getting worse, lately. “Yeah. I know. Something big must be coming, but I know it’s not your friend.” He pauses, fiddles again, stands up from the books he’s been hunched over for hours. His chest aches. He misses Amelia, and he misses Dean, and he misses Cas, Dean having Cas, wishes they could all catch a fucking break.

“If I can help,” he says finally. “Just fill me in.”

 

It’s weeks later and no news, and Dean finally breaks. Sam hears the sudden sob, the choke in his voice, the sound of his knees hitting the floor. “Maybe you can hear me better like this,” and Sam can’t take it anymore, can’t turn a blind eye, crawls out of bed and finds Dean slumped on the floor with broken glass just out of reach.

“Dean,” he says, trying to be gentle, neutral, trying not to startle him or shut him down, but Dean doesn’t even twitch.

“Tried so damn hard to get us out of there,” Dean says, broken and exhausted, and Sam takes a cautious step forward, skirting the broken glass to get to Dean. His shoulders are still, his head bowed, limbs loose, and Dean’s had bad nights but nothing like this. “Should’ve stayed in,” he says, quiet. “Least I could find him, there. Least I could protect him, there.”

Sam pushes the glass aside with a socked foot and kneels down in front of his brother, sees the tears dripping to his chin, and it rips a new, painful wound inside him to see Dean like this. Because he’s been half-angry at Dean ever since Purgatory and Amelia and Dean’s been the same with him, but this is why: because they’re suffering and they’re losing, always seems like they’re losing, and Dean’s not like he used to be, anymore. He can’t shake it all off and keep going, he gets bogged down with the pain, and Sam hates to watch but he can’t walk away.

“Something’s wrong, Sammy,” Dean says, not a question. “He wouldn’t just—he said he couldn’t go back to Heaven, that if he did, saw the damage he’d done, he would—”

Sam doesn’t need the explanation. He’s done his fair share of destruction, knows what Cas might do.

“If he can’t even hear me—if he’s—”

Sam reaches forward and wraps his arms around Dean’s shoulders, hopeless, powerless, and Dean doesn’t push away or stiffen up but clings to Sam, crumpled, his face pressed right into the years-old tattoo and Sam wonders if Dean still has that handprint, if he has to live with the memory of Castiel burned into his flesh every hour of every day, all that history a livid burn on his shoulder that he can’t get rid of.

“I don’t know what to do, Sammy,” Dean chokes out.

“We could summon him,” Sam says, even though it’s desperate and touched with dread, “and if he doesn’t come—then we’ll know something is keeping him away.”

“Or that he’s dead,” Dean says, harsh and resistant, but Sam squeezes tighter.

“Cas is a fighter. He wouldn’t just…” But Sam can’t say it. “Not without telling you.”

Dean pulls back, eyes red, and says, “I don’t know how it got so messed up. I don’t know why—I can’t shake it when it’s him.”

“Maybe there’s something to that,” Sam says, because before Cas it was only ever him that got Dean like that.

“Don’t,” Dean grates, his eyes wild with pain.

“You know I don’t care,” Sam says, because he has to get it out sometime even if he feels like Dean should just know by now. “You know I don’t—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, it is, it’s just not easy. Look, Dean—we’ve got next to nothing left. This place,” and Sam looks up at the library, the ancient bunker rearing up around them, “it’s great, but it’s not people. You might just—look, I’m just saying, next time he turns up, maybe you should hold on.”

“If he turns up,” Dean says, and it’s clear he doesn’t think that’s ever going to happen again.

“Let’s summon him,” Sam says, trying to sound convincing. “At least we’ll know.”

Dean goes along with it: preparing the ingredients, striking the match. And then they wait, breath baited, shoulder-to-shoulder.

It’s less of a landing, and more of a crash: Castiel, bloody and bruised, hits the ground right in front of them, shatters the floorboards. His eyes open, dazed, and the first thing he looks at is Dean. He cringes, and there’s blood on his lips.

“I’m sorry,” he coughs. “I don’t…I heard you, but I couldn’t…I tried.” His eyes roll up, slide shut, and the stunned silence is broken as Dean staggers forward and falls back to his knees, grabbing Cas’s shoulder.

“Cas,” he says, and the blue eyes flicker open again, staring into Dean’s face with an expression so open, so miserable and hopeful at once, that Sam feels strongly as if he’s intruding, but he can’t slink away, because what if this is really it? “Hey, buddy,” Dean says gently, a voice Sam’s hardly ever heard before. “Tell me what I can do.”

Surprise, confusion; Cas coughs again. “I believe I’ll heal,” he says, and his gaze flickers for the first time over Dean’s shoulder to Sam, struggling to focus. “I heard you as well, Sam. Thank you for your concern.”

Dean glances up, gives Sam a real you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me look, and Sam just shrugs tightly back. “No problem, man,” Sam says, starting to slowly back up. He could do without the staring contest they’re having now that Cas is done addressing him. It could go on for a while, and they have no qualms about making others uncomfortable.

“Thought you were dead,” Dean says, his voice almost too low to hear.

Cas smiles as Dean’s free hand curls around his other shoulder, gently pulling him upright. “This is your problem, Dean,” he says, and he sounds exhausted but genuine, like he’ll be okay. “You have no faith.”

Before Sam finally turns away he sees Cas getting wrapped up in a bear hug, the kind he won’t get out of for a while, and he melts into it, getting blood all over Dean, lifting trembling arms to hang on tight.


	2. We're Okay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do you do with an angel after he crash-lands in your legacy bunker? Happy fucking Valentine’s Day, people. This is pure, unadulterated fluff. (Sort of.)

Sam goes back to his room and Dean thinks about leaving Cas in one of the many other bedrooms this place has to offer, but Cas is still bleeding and woozy, and truth be told, Dean’s not willing to let him out of his sight. In fact, if he doesn’t keep touching or at least looking at Cas, he’s convinced the angel’ll just flutter off again, and it’ll all have been a dream.

“C’mon,” he says, ducking beneath Cas’s arm and straightening up with the angel’s weight on his shoulders. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Cas leans into him, and his warmth is solid, welcome, his cheekbone pressed to Dean’s shoulder as he half-shuffles along, letting Dean drag him forward. They carefully circumvent the broken glass in the library, and Cas’s eyes snag on it as they pass.

“You weren’t any clearer,” he slurs, and Dean glances down at him, shaken by the weakness in Cas’s voice.

“Yeah,” Dean says, nudging Cas toward his room. “I figured.”

“But you were clear,” Cas says, and flinches. “I could always hear you.”

Dean doesn’t like the sound of that, the sheer longing in Cas’s voice, like he’s still trying so hard to get back, fighting whatever bonds he’d been captured in.

“Don’t talk,” Dean mutters. “Just rest. You’re safe now.”

He lets Cas gently down to the bed—the angel wobbles and just manages to stay upright, sitting at the edge—and hurries to the bathroom to get supplies. He comes back with an old basin full of warm water, a few towels, bandages, some disinfectant, and needle and thread, just in case.

“Up,” he instructs, and when Cas looks up at him out of eyes sunk in bruises, he says, more gently, “just for a minute. Gotta see the damage.”

He helps Cas get to his feet and peels off the layers: trench coat, suit jacket, tie, dress shirt, belt, pants. The body that once belonged to Jimmy Novak is covered in bruises and cuts, but only one truly bad gash, deep and diagonal across his chest. Dean helps Cas sit back down again and pulls up a chair, going to work on the deepest wound first and trying to ignore how much his hands are shaking in relief.

“I’ll heal eventually,” Cas says, and he sounds confused now. “You don’t need to—”

“I want to,” Dean interrupts, dipping a towel in the warm water at his feet. “It’ll be faster if I help, won’t it?”

“Don’t you want to know,” Cas asks, his voice slow, full of dread, “where I’ve been? What I’ve been doing?” He already sounds a little stronger, less likely to pass out, but maybe that’s because he’s sitting instead of trying to stand.

Dean looks up, pressing the damp towel to the wound. “Yeah,” he says, slowly. “Course I do. Right now, though, I don’t care. You’re here, and you’ve clearly been through Hell.” Cas winces, like that strikes too close to home. “Just…just relax, okay? We’ll figure everything else out…later. You aren’t…” Dean hesitates, cleaning the gash without needing to look, his eyes fixed on the blue of Cas’s. “You’re not gonna get yanked back, are you?”

Cas shakes his head, letting his gaze fall to Dean’s hand on his chest. “You were right, in a sense, about this place. I couldn’t see you, here. I could hear you, but even if I had been…allowed to look for you…it would have been difficult, if you hadn’t summoned me. I don’t believe she can find me, here.” And he cringes, shrinks back, and Dean’s reminded of Samandriel’s screams, of Cas sinking down the wall with terror on his face.

“You’re safe,” Dean soothes. “Just…relax.” He goes on cleaning the wound, and Cas shudders once and falls still, watching Dean.

God, he’d missed that: the open staring that Cas still hasn’t lost the knack of after years and years. He feels like he’s being drunk in, consumed, and it’s good, feels right. He doesn’t even tell Cas to stop, it feels so comfortable.

“Dean,” Cas says, suddenly, his voice much quieter now. “I don’t want to leave again.”

“Then don’t,” Dean replies, easy. “Stay here. We’ve got these kickass rooms and a full kitchen, for once. If you’re safe here, then stay.”

Cas nods, still slow. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Dean confirms, and starts threading the needle for Cas’s stitches.

He works in silence, his hands firm on Cas’s skin, carefully mending the wound. Cas doesn’t even cringe, sitting perfectly still, letting Dean sew him up without a single murmur of protest or pain. He finishes closing the gash and moves to the smaller scrapes all over Cas’s torso, cleaning and bandaging where appropriate, saves the slice across his cheekbone for last. Cas stares at him while he cleans it, carefully rubbing away the smeared blood.

“Good as new,” Dean says bracingly, even though he can’t do a damn thing about the bruises. He gets up, goes over to his dresser, pulls out a t-shirt and sweats, because Cas’s clothes are bloodied all the way through and he knows he doesn’t have enough mojo to clean them up. “Here,” he says, holding out the offering to Cas. “Until we can get your stuff washed.”

Cas just looks up at him with mournful, grateful eyes, and Dean turns his back while Cas shuffles out of his boxers and into Dean’s clothes. Dean’s getting a killer headache now, the impact of even more sleep deprivation than usual catching up with him, like it has been every night for a while now. He picks up the bottle of Tylenol on his desk and downs a few along with half of a just-stale glass of water, then turns to see Cas, face bone-white, sitting at the edge of the mattress again and small in Dean’s clothes.

Dean holds out two tablets and the rest of the water. “It’ll help with the pain,” he says, and Cas gives him a disbelieving look but obeys anyway.

This is where it gets tricky, and he doesn’t know if Cas’ll go for it, but he’s not letting the angel out of his sight. No way. And he is not sleeping on the floor in his own bedroom. And sometimes a bed is just a bed, and comfort is just comfort, and he thinks they could both do with some of that.

So he pulls off his socks and climbs into bed, brushing past Cas, settling just on the other side with his hand on the lamp’s switch, ready to shut it off once Cas gets comfortable. The sheets are old but comfortable, the blanket and comforter thick, and he worms down under the lot of them, warming the cool fabric.

The angel just looks at him, confused, head tilted slightly to the side. He looks bad—real bad; like he did when he was Falling, way back. But there’s a glint in his eyes that’s new, beneath the murk of guilt and anxiety, something that looks like hope.

“Dean?” he asks, as though he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t care if you think you don’t need sleep,” Dean says, looking straight at him. “I’m here to tell you otherwise, buddy. Come on.”

Cas shuffles, clumsy with pain and so close to human that it hurts Dean, too. Dean pulls up the sheets and blankets and Cas slides under them, confusion still plain on his face, and that darkness fighting with the relief. Dean puts out the light, but there’s still enough to see by with the glow emanating through the cracked door leading to the library. They’ve taken to leaving a few lights on out in the big, cavernous spaces at night, since this is a place where the sun never makes an appearance, and it’s good to have a pervasive, dim sort of light, down here in the dark.

“It can’t be this simple,” Cas says suddenly, his voice pitched with disbelief.

“What?” Dean asks, even though he knows very well what.

“I’ve been gone for weeks, Dean.” He sounds so broken, so devastated by it. “Not answering your prayers. Not answering Sam’s. And you’ve been in so much pain. I did not expect a warm welcome when I realized you had summoned me.”

“You might be a dumbass, but I’m not.” Cas bristles at that comment, the energy of him making it feel suddenly as if Dean’s sharing a bed with a porcupine, but Dean reaches out and grabs his shoulder anyway, pulls Cas to face him. “Look, last time you ignored me for any length of time, you were tryin’ to protect me. I don’t have to like it, but I can understand it, and at this point, I’m just glad to see you alive. I thought…” Dean swallows, and Cas gets that look on his face, the one that gives Sam’s puppy eyes a run for their money.

“You were so angry,” Cas says quietly.

“I was scared. You told me you couldn’t go back to Heaven, and then you did. I didn’t want to lose you. Again.” Dean’s hand is still on Cas’s shoulder so he squeezes, hard. “Raphael. Lucifer. Leviathan. Sam’s Hell baggage. Purgatory, and then Purgatory again. You’d think I’d get used to it. You’d think it would hurt less. It just cuts deeper, every time.” He clears his throat. “Do you get it yet? Do you get how much I need you?”

When he slides his arm around Cas’s waist, the angel melts into him. Their legs get tangled up, and Cas presses his face into Dean’s chest, his hand sliding up Dean’s arm to clench tight into his shoulder, holding on. Clinging. He presses into Dean like his life depends on it, like he doesn’t know any better than to seek out Dean’s touch.

“After all I’ve done,” Cas says, and his voice is strained, but Dean isn’t having any of that crap.

“You’re talking to the guy who broke the first seal,” he says, a little dry, and feels Cas’s lips move in what might be a smile through his shirt. “And, uh, my little brother let Lucifer out of the box. You’re among friends, Cas. Fuck-Ups Anonymous. Hi, my name is Dean, I’m a high-functioning alcoholic, I kill monsters, and occasionally I start the Apocalypse.”

His shirt feels a little wet. He thinks Cas might be crying, just judging by the way his shoulders are trembling.

“Hey,” Dean soothes, murmuring into Cas’s dark hair. “It’s okay. You’re safe. We’re okay.” He rubs Cas’s back, slow, up and down his spine, light and careful around the bruises, and savors the weight of the angel warm against him, solid and real. “We’re okay,” he whispers, and he means it, despite their history, despite the last few, horrible years.

He murmurs things that are vaguely comforting, smoothes a hand down Cas’s hair and back, and slowly, Cas quiets, goes still again, until he’s breathing evenly, and Dean thinks he might be asleep. He’s getting close to drifting off himself, exhausted by the weight of his relief, when Cas’s lips move against the hollow of his neck, his voice small but honest.

“When she was torturing me, sometimes I dreamed,” he says. “Sometimes I thought it was my Heaven, and you were always there.”

Dean’s heart tries to burst. He’s a total girl, and he’s man enough to admit it. He presses his lips to Cas’s hair, closes his eyes. His sinuses are burning suspiciously, and he thinks that it took them way too long to get to this.

“I love you too, Cas,” he says, quiet and gruff. “Go to sleep.”


	3. Let 'Em

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean does the only thing that makes sense to him: he makes breakfast.

When Castiel wakes up, Dean’s gone.  
  
For a moment, he panics: sits bolt upright, stares wildly around the room, wonders if he’s about to be engulfed in Holy Fire, cringes when the deep wound in his chest pulls. But he picks up the low murmur of Dean’s voice a few rooms away, and Sam’s answering tones, and the clink of dishes, and he realizes he’s safe, really safe, in a way he hasn’t been in years.  
  
Sagging with relief, he eases back down into the mattress—it’s easily a hundred times more comfortable than any motel bed he’s ever encountered during his friendship with Dean—and re-nests in the blankets and sheets, trying to find a position that doesn’t prick up any pain. Eventually, he settles, closes his eyes, breathes deep. The wounds are healing; the pain is really only an inconvenience. His Grace is doing its work, repairing him, albeit slower than usual, but he can’t even put a timeframe to how long he was held captive by Naomi, can’t remember clearly what forms of torture she used, or what, exactly, she wanted from him. If he’s crippled, it’s for good reason. It’s a painful blur, and he shudders back from it, tries not to remember.  
  
He opens his eyes again to look around the room, and realizes, with a note of surprise, that it has the air of permanence about it. Dean’s weapons are mounted on the walls, a picture of him and his mother is on the desk, and it’s all clean and well-cared for. He wonders how long Dean has been here, letting his few belongings drift into a room that’s unmistakably his own.  
  
Dean knocks on the door with his foot and carries in a tray with two bowls, half-wary and half-welcoming. “Morning,” he says, and sits down on the edge of the bed close to Castiel. “Don’t know if food’s going to help you, or anything, but I thought it couldn’t hurt.”  
  
Castiel looks down at the bowls in interest. The sharp scent of cinnamon drifts up to him on a warm current. “You made this?”  
  
“It’s just oatmeal,” Dean grunts, but then he smiles. “Though I do make a killer burger, when you’re up for it. We’ve got a kitchen now.” He holds out a bowl to Castiel, and when the angel takes it and his hands are occupied, Dean’s fingers travel up to the collar of his shirt and pull down, inspecting the wound. “You still heal fast,” he says approvingly. “We’ll need to get those stitches out later.”  
  
Castiel just makes a noise of appreciation, mouth full of oatmeal, banana, peanut butter, and cinnamon. Dean chuckles, digs into his own breakfast, and they eat in a companionable silence that Castiel relishes; it’s something they haven’t had in a long while, something he’d never hoped for again.  
  
It strikes him again how comfortable Dean is here; he’s rarely seen the hunter out of his boots and jeans, but it’s clear that that’s the norm in this bunker, that Dean’s as far from expecting to be attacked here as he ever is.  
  
“You’ve been here a while,” Castiel says finally, when his bowl is empty.  
  
“Few weeks, yeah.” Dean offers him a piece of toast, and he takes a bite with gratitude. “Henry Winchester fell out of our closet a while back. Long story short, turns out he was part of some super-secret frat that all got wiped out, so he left the key to this place with us. Kinda been living here.”  
  
“Nesting,” Castiel comments, and wonders belatedly if he shouldn’t have, but Dean just laughs.  
  
“Yeah. No feathers, though. I’m not a damn bird. Unlike some people I know.”  
  
Castiel turns his attention back to his toast. “I thought you might need them. They have many uses, but not to me, unless they’re attached. And I do not molt in your car,” he adds, a bit reproachfully.  
  
Dean laughs again, reaches out and cups Castiel’s jaw in his hand. The touch is a surprise, and Castiel starts a bit in reaction, but it isn’t unwelcome; Dean’s warmth bleeds into him like sun. “You are a weird son of a bitch,” Dean says, but it’s affectionate rather than accusatory, and then Dean’s mouth is on his, soft and warm and unexpectedly chaste.  
  
When Dean pulls back, he’s a little red, his eyes uncertain. “Was that okay?” he asks, as though he really doesn’t know, and Castiel doesn’t really know how to answer.  
  
“Of course,” he says finally. “Dean…”  
  
“It’s okay,” Dean says, brushing the pad of his thumb over Castiel’s cheekbone. “I know.” He smiles at Castiel—a small thing, really, but so full of feeling that it makes Castiel’s chest ache—and then gathers up their bowls and spoons. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, and Castiel watches him go, feeling warm and safe in spite of the mess behind him.  
  
  
  
Dean’s flying a little blind, here.  
  
His hands shake as he loads up the sink with warm water and soap, and he stares sightlessly at the dishes, feeling as if he’s been burned. It’s not that he’s never found other men attractive (because Hell, that isn’t true), and it’s not even that he’s never kissed a guy before today (though that is, unsurprisingly, true; the time to experiment was in his twenties and his dad was still alive, back then); it’s that it’s Cas, and that such a small touch can still feel like such a big deal even after all they’ve been through, after everything.  
  
It’s not a guy thing. It’s a Cas thing. Maybe it’s a little bit of an angel thing, too, but mostly it’s just that this is Cas, this is gripped-you-tight-and-raised-you-from-Perdition, this is the angel who saved him and almost killed his brother, this is the being who has done everything for him without even the bond of blood to motivate him, and this is something he’s wanted so bad and never dared take, not ever.  
  
Because he has wanted Cas, he knows. He’s not that lacking in self-awareness. It’s been years in the making, years that have been more painful than good. Maybe that’s why he never dared to try and have Cas like this before, because right when he realized how much deeper this thing went was when everything really went to Hell.  
  
And he’s still got his apprehensions about the whole idea, but if this is what it takes to make Cas stay, he’ll do it. He’ll do anything, and it’s not like he’ll be suffering for it, either.  
  
He’s managed to stop taking apart the warm, hazy memory of that kiss (he isn’t a girl, he swears as he scrubs out the bowls and dishes from the night before, he isn’t) by the time something bumps into the kitchen behind him and falls into a chair at the table. When he turns around, Cas is leaning back against the chair, watching him with as enigmatic of a gaze as ever—but there’s a hint of fear in it, now, and a strong edge of affection, too. He’s seen that there before, saw it in Purgatory every damn time Cas looked at him, and sometimes he hated the knowledge that he was what had made Cas so human, so emotive—but sometimes he took pride in it, too.  
  
“Hey,” he says, because he has no clue what else to say, and Cas huffs back at him and closes his eyes. “You get tired?”  
  
“I overestimated my strength,” Cas replies, sounding unaccountably pissy. Dean ducks his head and hides his grin under the pretense of staring at the soapy dishes.  
  
“Take it easy, man. Nowhere to be, right?”  
  
Cas shifts behind him. “No.” He sounds a little relieved by that prospect.  
  
“Then don’t go all life alert on me. Try not to strain yourself.” He yanks the plug out of the bottom of the sink and starts rinsing the dishes in a fresh stream of water, stacking them carefully on the drying rack. “On a scale of one to crash landing, though, how’re you feeling?”  
  
He can feel the half-annoyed, half-fond gaze burning through the back of his skull. “Better,” Cas says. “My Grace is not without damage, but it’s healing.”  
  
“Must’ve been a rough Bible Camp visit,” Dean mutters, trying not to imagine what Cas might have gone through since his last appearance.  
  
When he turns around, wiping his hands on a fresh towel, Cas looks wary again, a little scared, and smaller, somehow.  
  
“Hey,” he tries, his voice softening automatically. “Cas. It’s okay. It was a joke. A bad one,” he adds.  
  
But Cas isn’t looking at him anymore; he’s staring at the floor, and his fingers have tightened on his knees, and Dean can see from here that his jaw’s clenched.  
  
So he closes the gap between them, kneels down in front of the angel, and gently pries the fingers off his knees. “Cas,” he murmurs. “Buddy. Stay with me, huh?”  
  
Cas looks up and it’s like his eyes are blind, frantic with not seeing. “I don’t know what they did to me,” he says. The note of fear in his voice makes Dean’s blood run cold, because Cas is never scared. Not when facing down archangels, not when he’s human, not when he’s cracking another dimension wide open, not even when he’s crazy, but he is now, after Heaven, and Dean finds a whole new reservoir of hate for those feathery bastards upstairs.  
  
“You seem okay to me,” Dean says, trying to keep his tone light. “Same bad sense of humor and all.”  
  
“They pulled me out of Purgatory,” Cas says, his gaze fixed on Dean’s now, earnest. “An entirely new faction of angels I’ve never known, from a region of Heaven I’ve never seen. This is beyond us, Dean. I was never supposed to escape from Purgatory. There was no way out, but they made a way. There are not enough angels left for the siege machines we once created, so how? And why?”  
  
Dean squeezes his hands, because Cas looks a short step away from full-blown panic. “We’ll figure it out,” he reasons. “Fuck it all, we always do.” He grins, and it feels a little wild, like it did in Purgatory when he’d just found Cas again, but that’s the effect the damn angel has on him. A surge of adrenaline that lasts days, weeks, months, the sheer belief that he can take on the world, all of it: Leviathan, Heaven and Hell. “Angels wanna come after us? Let ‘em. We’ve taken them on enough times before, and we always come out on top. We’ve got this. Okay?”  
  
The panic in Cas’s eyes flickers for a moment, and then it changes, melts into full-on belief, and Dean knows he’s won, Cas trusts him to get them both out alive this time, and that’s all he needs. He grins up at Cas and the angel smiles tentatively back, his fingers moving gently beneath Dean’s.  
  
Let ‘em, Dean thinks, and he knows he’s crazy but he doesn’t care, because if it means he’s got his brother and his angel, alive and whole, then it’s worth it.


	4. Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twenty-four hours after his crash landing, Cas still hasn’t healed fully. Maybe he never will.

Dean tries--half-heartedly, without any actual effort--to give Cas his own room. Gives him the grand tour of their underground, super-secret bunker, gives him his pick of spaces. But Cas looks at every room with the same gaunt stare, sits on every bed and lies very unconvincingly about how comfortable it is, and Dean, who wasn’t very enthusiastic about letting Cas further than twenty feet away to begin with, gives up.  
  
“Why don’t you just stay with me,” he says, leaning against the last doorframe. He means to make it a question, but it doesn’t come out that way. “Probably better,” he adds, and thinks about the half of his room that’s still empty, the side with the chair in the corner turned toward the bed.  
  
Cas’s features twitch toward relief, and then lock with pain; he presses a surprised hand to his chest and flinches. He’s been too pale since his touchdown, now a whole day ago--though, to Dean, it feels like much longer than that, like yesterday was before and today is after, a dividing line somewhere in between that changed everything.  
  
“Yes,” he says, his voice grating. “I’d like that.”  
  
Dean moves forward to help him back up, navigates the landscape of the wound that’s giving Cas the most grief and tries not to create any unnecessary pain. Cas leans heavily against him, his arm around Dean’s shoulders, Dean’s tucked firmly around Cas’s waist. He thinks that Cas half-loathes this, having to be helped, but then his body stops fighting and relaxes into Dean, accepting the support, and there’s something about holding Cas up that Dean kinda likes.  
  
They bump into Sam in the hallway. “Find a good dead guy room?” he jokes, smiling a little too big, overcompensation for the worry he’s trying to mask. Dean knows his brother. The nerd’s giant brain it going to keep him up all night worrying--worrying about Cas, about what he knows, about their safety, about how Dean’s dealing with all this.  
  
Cas squints up at Sam, perplexed. “There aren’t--”  
  
“He’s kidding. No ghosts, no dead people. No,” Dean directs at Sam, and tries to sound completely normal when he says the next part. “He’s staying with me.”  
  
Sam’s eyebrow only lifts a tick. He doesn’t blink; he isn’t surprised. Dean didn’t expect him to be. Sam probably knows him better than he knows himself.  
  
“Oh,” he says, and clears his throat. “Right. Night, then.” And he backs away, shuffling down the hallway with as quick a speed he can get away with without it looking weird. Dean can’t help but smirk, just a little. Now his giant nerd brain will keep him up with more painful images. As if Sam realizes this, he shoots a last-minute glare over his shoulder before disappearing into his room and slamming the door behind him. Dean’s smirk fades.  
  
Not that any of those images will come close to reality. Not tonight. Not now. Cas needs to heal, and they’ve waited--Dean wonders how long he’s been waiting, when the vague haze of emotion surrounding Castiel clarified into something knife-sharp and deep. He thinks it’s been years, but it’s hard to know.  
  
“Come on,” Dean mutters, because Cas is giving him a curious look through a little frown of pain, and they make their way slowly back to his room. He turns off lights as they go, casting the whole place into half-shadow. Cas puts his hand to his chest again, and Dean feels him shudder.  
  
“You okay?” he asks, letting the angel down at the edge of the bed. His blue eyes are dark, the gaze far away. “Looked pretty healed up when I took the stitches out.”  
  
Cas’s hand tremors as he reaches up and pulls down the collar of his shirt, exposing the edge of the new scar. “It’s healed,” he agrees.  
  
But Dean leans forward, frowning, and tugs down the shirt a little more. “Yeah, but it hasn’t changed any since this afternoon,” he says, a cold kind of dread creeping into him. “The way you heal, you shouldn’t even have a scar by now. Should you?”  
  
“No,” Cas says, quiet, and looks down at his hands.  
  
Dean sits down next to him. “What’s going on?” he asks, even though he already knows.  
  
“I’m Falling,” Cas answers, the words brittle. “My Grace, it’s...receding much faster, this time. Much faster than before. I don’t think I’ll be an angel anymore, in the morning.”  
  
Dean swallows, because he knows this can’t be good; his mouth and throat are dry with fear and he doesn’t want to ask, but he does. “Why?”  
  
“I’ve been cut off from Heaven,” Cas answers, gaze turning to the wall of Dean’s room that’s still empty. “And there are no longer garrisons stationed on Earth; there aren’t enough angels to spare. Isn’t that...” Cas pauses, looks away again. “Isn’t that what I said, when you saw me in 2014? That I lost the last of my Grace when the angels left Earth?”  
  
Dean frowns. “I never told you what I saw.”  
  
“You dream of it,” Cas says, sounding mildly embarrassed. “Sometimes.”  
  
“Personal space,” Dean mutters, mutinous, but he lifts a hand to Cas’s shoulder anyway. “Human by morning, huh?”  
  
“It’s better this way,” Cas says, and it’s sincere but forlorn. “I’ll be outside of her control. I won’t be able to hurt anyone. I won’t be able to hurt you.”  
  
“Was that the plan?” Dean asks, and the knife in his stomach twists deeper, because that would--if the mysterious she wanted to destroy Castiel, Angel of the Lord, destroy him utterly, that’s the way to do it, and Dean knows it. He harbors no illusions about the depth of Cas’s devotion to him. It’s useless to deny when he’s traced Cas’s motivation for every action over the last few years, and the answer is always Dean.  
  
Cas looks miserable when he looks up at Dean again. “I don’t know what her plans were,” he says. “I only know that when she laid them out, when she ordered me to follow them, I did. Rescuing--killing Samandriel...” His voice chokes, his shoulders hunch, his hands slide up into his hair, knot so tightly there that Dean’s afraid he’ll rip it out. “I didn’t want to,” he whispers. “Samandriel was good, and I...I killed him. He was trying to warn me. Trying to warn me about her, and she wouldn’t let him.”  
  
Cas crumples, folds, and Dean wraps an arm around his shoulders, tries to draw him close, even though Cas fights him every inch of the way. He’s shaking and muttering and half’s in Enochian and Dean can’t understand him, can’t hear him over the roar of his own pulse, fierce with rage, in his ears. He’s blind with it, murderous with it, drenched in the purity of black and white and it’s like Purgatory, knowing exactly who the bad guys are, but he can’t get at them and it’s killing him.  
  
“I shouldn’t,” Cas says, wild, even as Dean wraps him up, coaxes him to give in. “I shouldn’t be here, she’ll find me, and I’ll hurt you, I always hurt you, I’m cursed, I’m cursed--”  
  
“Shut up,” Dean says, too harsh, because his head is pounding and he needs a face to imagine so he can dream of beating it to a pulp. “Shut up, Cas. It doesn’t matter.”  
  
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he mutters, shaking his head against Dean’s shoulder. “Don’t let me hurt you.”  
  
The anger gets washed out by pain, blinding, unbearable pain, because Cas sounds so damn broken and Dean doesn’t know what to do to fix it, so he does the only thing that makes sense: he cups Cas’s chin in his palm and makes him look up, look at him, and the blue eyes torn by despair are the last things he sees before he’s kissing the angel, fierce and intent, trying to communicate all the things he doesn’t know how to say, things like it’s going to be okay and I won’t leave you, I won’t ever leave you and a dozen others, all the words stopped up in his chest by the years and mistakes that have stood between them.  
  
And Cas, like he can’t help it, reacts; his hand curls around the back of Dean’s neck and drags him closer, and then he’s being pushed, forceful, down to the bed, and Cas follows him down, awkwardly arranges himself over Dean, presses into every inch of him until Dean swears he can feel the angel in his bones. Cas’s lips are still on his and it’s softer now, his hands wrapped loosely around the angel’s hips, their bodies molded together, until Cas finally flinches, a sharp hiss of pain.  
  
“We can fix that,” Dean murmurs, and rolls Cas onto his back, eliminating the pressure from his new scar, then leans over him to turn out the light.  
  
Cas trails shaking fingertips down his cheek, and in the dim glow from outside, Dean can still see his eyes, dark pools of blue that stare up at him with reverence, adoration.  
  
“I think I’m broken,” Cas says, quieter than before, a little steadier.  
  
“Just trust me,” Dean soothes, trails lips over Cas’s temple, letting his nose brush against soft dark hair. “I’m gonna take care of you. Okay? You’ve been doing all the work, buddy. Let me help.”  
  
They don’t sleep. Cas’s Grace slips away, trickles faster every minute, and Dean doesn’t want to miss the beginning of his new life, wants to ease the passing in any way he can, so he introduces Cas to humanity with gentle hands: teaches him how good it feels to have his back rubbed, and he practically purrs, like a cat; swipes his tongue into the hollow at Cas’s throat and pulls out a sharp gasp from the Falling angel; curls fingers into his stomach and tests if Cas is ticklish, and it rewarded by a deep, sharp laugh, grin cut short by surprise; pulls Cas into him for long moments and runs hands over his hair, lulls him into peace with simple, repetitive touch; and when Cas lifts his head up, eyes half-lidded and sleepy, to look at Dean, Dean kisses his slack lips and the wrinkles at the corners of the blue, runs his tongue through the perpetual stubble that’s edged just that much closer to Purgatory, and Cas smiles, hesitant but incapable of subduing it, and when he finally falls asleep against Dean’s shoulder Dean lays awake a lot longer, fighting the burn in his sinuses, holding onto his angel long after his arm’s fallen asleep.


	5. Settling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean's finally learned to appreciate the value of a day off.

When Dean staggers into the kitchen in the morning, it’s not exactly the morning after that Sam imagined. He’d been braced for a lot of suggestive eyebrow-waggles, merciless smirking, and comments full of innuendo--but instead, Dean looks worse than he’s looked in days: dark circles deepened under his eyes, a certain haggard, gaunt look that Cas has been wearing, transferred to Dean.

Sam feels goosebumps rise on his arms.

Dean glances at him and grunts a good morning, then heads straight to the coffee pot, leaning down on his elbows beside it, watching it percolate. Slowly.

“What’s up?” Sam asks, trying to keep his tone casual.

Dean doesn’t look at him. His green eyes are a little blank, almost dazed, and when he says, “Cas is human,” it’s with a tone of shell-shock that Sam hasn’t heard in a long time. Maybe not since Wyoming, and fuck, was that almost a decade ago now?

“Human,” he repeats, and he sounds a little shocked himself.

Dean scrubs a hand over his face and goes back to watching the coffee pot. “He Fell,” he confirms, a little more firmly now. “Last night. Somethin’ about...he’s cut off from Heaven again, and there’s no angels left on Earth, so.” He clears his throat. “Human.”

Sam blinks. “Is he okay?” he asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Dean lifts his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug. “He seems all right. Gonna take some getting used to.”

Sam pauses, and then, judging that he won’t get more than a look for the comment, asks, “Are you okay?”

Dean looks fucking terrible. Exhausted, worn down, burned out. But he smiles, and it actually touches his bloodshot eyes, crinkling the crow’s feet at the corners. Sam thinks that Dean looks middle-aged, and wonders when that happened, when he got the chance to develop the barely-there pudge on his stomach or the laugh lines around his mouth.

“He’s safe,” Dean says, pulling the coffee pot out and taking down what Sam has realized is his favorite mug; it’s the only one he ever uses. “Yeah, he’s not an angel anymore, but he’s still Cas, and he’ll be fine. So, yeah. I’m fuckin’ awesome.”

The funny thing is that Dean looks like he actually means it, half-smile lingering at the corner of his mouth as he pours coffee, and Sam reflects on the fact that Dean even has a favorite mug, that he’s got a robe and a bedroom to call his own, and his throat tightens up a little, because he didn’t think that Dean could ever embrace these things--could ever make himself a home.

“Good,” Sam manages, and then, inspired, because Dean’s not going to let this conversation go on much longer, he adds, “That’s great, Dean. I’m happy for you.”

Sure enough, Dean looks up, raises an eyebrow, and the content little half-smile turns into a smirk. “I’m sorry,” Dean says, and he doesn’t look sorry at all, “did I trigger something? Do you want me to braid your hair and listen to you cry about your feelings now?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he mutters, looking back to his laptop, and Dean just snickers, sitting down across from him. “Look, I think I’m gonna clear out for a few days, check up on Kevin. He’s not answering his damn phone again.”

“Probably a good idea,” Dean grunts. “Last time I was there he was livin’ off tofu dogs. That was it. Refrigerator full of ‘em. That can’t be healthy.”

No, it really isn’t, and Sam frowns at his computer, worrying. Kevin’s had the same deranged energy around him that Sam had, back when Jess had just died and he was cutting a swath of revenge through every supernatural piece of crap that got in his way, and he knows that’s not good for a person but he also doesn’t know how to help the kid--God knows Sam never really figured out how to deal with the acute sense of loss himself.

“You’ll be okay with Cas?” Sam confirms, and Dean gives a huff of exasperation.

“Me’n Cas’ll be fine. Go save the prophet from himself.”

When Sam takes off later that morning, Dean and Cas are in the kitchen eating breakfast, and Cas’s bare feet are in Dean’s lap. It makes him miss Amelia with an ache that persists even when he leaves the vision behind and drives, the growl of the Impala’s engine comforting beneath him. It’s a good five hours to Warsaw, and only if he pushes, but he takes his time; he’s in no rush to get back. The countryside streaks by beside him, snow melting in ragged heaps on the shoulder, and he tries not to chart the route to Texas in his head.

It’s after nightfall when he pulls up to Garth’s houseboat, and, as always, he can’t hold back a snort at the paint emblazoned on the rear of the vessel. Did the sock puppet or the boat come first? he wonders, bemused, and locks the Impala behind him.

The boat is quiet, water lapping around the dock as Sam takes the stairs a few at a time, stretching his legs after the long drive. “Kevin,” he calls, banging the door with his fist a few times. “It’s Sam.”

When no one answers, he opens the door himself, hand already on the knife in his jacket. Something about the quiet doesn’t sit quite right, and after a lifetime of hunting, Sam knows better than to ignore a gut reaction like that.

“Kev,” he calls, more quietly now, and considers digging his flashlight out, too, because the interior of the houseboat is dark--but then he hears a groan from behind the table and stills, fingers tightening on the handle of his blade as he moves forward, quiet, eyes on where the sound originated from.

The dark shape on the floor just turns out to be Kevin, the anti-possession tattoo on his forearm intact; Sam catches a glimpse of it as he presses a hand to his forehead, lips twisting in a cringe.

“Kevin,” Sam says again, dropping down to one knee beside the prophet, and Kevin opens his eyes. He looks terrible, the dark shadows worse than the last time Sam saw him, a smear of blood under his nose. “Were you attacked?”

Kevin blinks up at him. “Attacked?” he repeats, and then his eyes focus, a light of recognition suddenly firing up inside. “Sam? What’re you doing here?”

“Checking up on you,” Sam replies, offering a hand to help him up, and Kevin lets himself be hauled to his feet. “Were you attacked?”

“No,” Kevin says, with a violent twitch of his head. His eyes are already swiveling away from Sam, going back to the massive board of notes and scribbles on the wall of the houseboat. “No, I think I just fainted. Maybe had a seizure. Not sure.” Before Sam can cut him off with a furious, What do you mean, you’re not fucking sure, Kevin continues, “What time is it?”

As Kevin gravitates bodily back to that wall of notes, Sam checks his watch. “Eight.”

“Oh,” Kevin says absently, squinting now. “What day is it?”

“Tuesday,” Sam replies, watching the prophet carefully.

“Oh,” Kevin says, with another violent twitch that might have been a nod. “Good.”

“Kev,” Sam starts, but just then, Kevin sways dangerously and Sam darts forward to catch his fall. “Hey,” Sam says, more worried than angry, now. “Stay with me, Kevin. How long’s it been since you’ve eaten? Something other than hot dogs?”

“Tofu dogs,” Kevin corrects faintly. “I don’t know.” He promptly passes out, going limp in Sam’s grasp.

With a heavy, exasperated sigh, Sam leans down to let Kevin drape over his shoulders, locking an arm under his knee and a hand around his wrist. “Jesus,” he mutters as he straightens up. “You dumbass. You’ve gotta take better care of yourself.”

Sam knows there’s only one way to guarantee that, so he carries Kevin out to the car before returning to the houseboat to gather up his notes and the tablet. There’s plenty of room in the bunker, and he doesn’t like the idea of having all of them in one place, but someone’s got to get it into Kevin’s head that he’s killing himself, and Dean’s become a pro at force-feeding lately. Sam thinks his brother actually likes the domesticity, likes cooking and then stuffing his food down unsuspecting throats like a middle-aged housewife. He smiles at the thought.

If he leaves now, he can make it back to Lebannon well before dawn.

 

 

“So,” Dean says, with a yawn and a stretch, and lets his hands come to rest on Cas’s ankles. “What do you want to do today?”

Cas looks at him with surprise. “You don’t have a case?”

Dean shrugs. “We’ve only been taking on the big stuff. Plenty of other hunters to go around.”

The surprised look didn’t fade. An eyebrow quirked up; Cas’s toes wiggled in his lap. “Really,” he replied, suspicious now.

Nonplussed, Dean stared back. “Yeah, really,” he said. “Gotta be fresh for whenever that tablet gets translated. It’s not exactly the Apocalypse out there--we’ve had some weird fuckin’ cases since I got back, man. And not necessarily weird in the deadly way, but in the there’s-a-nerdy-jealous-witch-behind-them way. We’ve been filtering our caseload.”

The corner of Cas’s mouth quirked up in a smile. “That’s not like you. You were still insisting on taking on every case you noticed when Lucifer was roaming free.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve grown.” It was sarcastic, but Dean smiled back, anyway. “So I’m not hunting a damn thing until Sam comes back with that prophet.”

“I thought he was just going to check in on Kevin.”

“Kid looked terrible last time I was there. If he’s the same, no way Sam’s leaving that houseboat without him. I know my brother. He’s a sucker for strays.” I am too, Dean thought, and cleared his throat. “So. First day human. Should do something fun.”

Cas was staring again, head tilted a fraction to the side. “We were in Purgatory for so long,” he said quietly, his features serious now. “I’d almost forgotten this aspect of your personality.”

Dean flicked the bottom of Cas’s foot and stood up. “Guess it’s time to remind you, then.”

“Shouldn’t we...” Cas hesitates, looks down at his hands. “Shouldn’t we talk about where I’ve been?”

Dean edges around the table, close enough to cup a hand around Cas’s cheek, fingertips brushing into his dark hair; Cas closes his eyes at the touch, presses into it, and Dean thinks that something so minor hasn’t made his pulse leap like that in a long time, maybe ever.

“Nah,” Dean says quietly. “Not today.”

He lets Cas go through the myriad of old board games the Men of Letters kept in the bunker while he sifts through his vinyls, looking for something good to listen to, and finally settles on the Eagles, turning the volume down low. He’s glad when Cas just comes up with a deck of cards, because poker’s easy to teach and he still has a vague distaste for board games after the incident with Sorry! in the mental clinic. And Cas, predictably, picks up on it quick, and it doesn’t matter so much what they’re doing, just that Cas is sitting here, with him, frowning at the fan of cards in his hand and the stack of chips at his elbow, and his feet are tangled up under the table around Dean’s calves, and they laugh and talk like they haven’t gotten to in years--just the two of them, Dean and Cas, not the Righteous Man and the Fallen Angel.

When it’s late enough, Dean gets Cas dressed in old clothes that fit well enough--a pair of his jeans held up with a belt, boots, a t-shirt and jacket, all a little oversized but he looks good, anyway, and then they walk into town to the local bar because Sam took the Impala. Cas walks a little slowly, still stiff from his crash landing, but their shoulders brush often, Dean letting him know that it’s okay. Sometimes Cas rolls his shoulders, a little motion that looks almost like unfurling wings, as if he’s testing out how it feels to not have them.

They get a booth in the bar and tackle hot wings and cheeseburgers; Cas curiously watches the hockey game playing on one of the bar’s many TVs and steals a lot of Dean’s fries and makes a pleased face around the first mouthful of every pint of beer. Hunting and tablets and secret factions of angels all fade so far back into his head that Dean nearly forgets them. They play pool and Cas, predictably, wins, and by the time the last call goes up they’re both loose-limbed and laughing, Dean’s arm thrown out around Cas’s shoulders as they leave the bar and walk home.

And when Cas leans up to kiss him just inside the door, tasting like warm beer, Dean digs fingers into his hips and blindly backs him toward the bedroom. Cas makes a noise in his throat, a muffled groan that Dean wants to bury himself in as Cas brings a hand up to cup the back of Dean’s neck and lets himself be pushed by Dean’s momentum; Dean’s been thinking about this since he watched, stunned, while Cas kissed Meg and thought, a little blindly, do that to me. And Cas does, the force of his lips a wave of heat, soft and insistent on Dean’s while the rasp of his stubble scrapes Dean’s skin, making him shudder.

He pushes Cas down to his bed, toes off his boots as Cas scrambles to get his shoes off, and follows him down. Cas rucks up Dean’s shirt, getting cool hands on warm skin, and Dean kisses him again, settling in the bracket of Cas’s legs, their bodies pressed together in one long line from hip to chest. All the blood has officially evacuated his brain, and Cas’s blown-out pupils--not to mention the rigid heat pressed into Dean’s hip--indicate he’s not the only one, so he drags his mouth across the stubble beneath Cas’s jaw and lets Cas claw his shirts off.

“Dean,” Cas breathes against his skin; Dean gets his teeth into the curve where Cas’s neck meets his shoulder and Cas breaks off with a groan, loud and surprised, his hips bucking up against Dean.

He’s back to kissing Cas deep into the mattress, swallowing down all the noises Cas’s throat offers up, hands jerking open belt buckles, when a door slams in the distance and Sam’s voice shouts, “Dean!”

It’s anxiety with an edge of irritation, and Dean knows his brother well enough to know it’s not really an emergency, but he still groans and rises up and Cas stares up at him, panting, lips puffy and bruised, hair crash-landing-vertical after being rubbed against the mattress.

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters, and yanks his t-shirt back over his head as Cas sits up, re-tightening his belt.

When they get out to the library, Sam’s dropping a half-conscious Kevin into an armchair by the fire. Sam’s armchair, which he won’t even letDean sit in. He’s wearing Bitchface #9, which means that Kevin must have really stepped in it. He crouches down, muttering under his breath, and gives Kevin’s shoulder a gentle shake, but the prophet doesn’t respond; the kid’s passed out, head lolling to the side in the armchair. His nose is bloody, dripping over his mouth onto his shirt.

“Garth kick him off the houseboat?” Dean asks, voice still a little too hoarse for casual conversation.

Sam’s got a wad of tissue mopping up the mess now, sliding up to hold it at Kevin’s nose. “No,” he says. “Garth’s not checking up on him often enough, and neither are we. He’s staying here. I think he had a seizure.”

“Or too many hot dogs,” Dean ventures. 

Sam finally gets up, satisfied that the blood has stopped flowing, and turns; his eyes sweep over their appearance--clothes askew, boots removed, hair ruffled, a bruise sucked into the crook of Cas’s neck--and he promptly cringes.

“Oh my god, my eyes,” he mutters, staring determinedly over their heads.

Dean can’t help a smirk. “Thought you were happy for me, Sammy,” he teases.

“I’ve got this,” Sam says, and flaps his hands at them without making eye contact. “Christ, I’ll only yell if we’re under attack from now on.”

Dean grabs Cas’s hand and, laughing now, tugs him back out of the library while Sam makes exaggerated retching noises behind him and even Cas chuckles and he thinks, yeah, he could get used to this.


	6. Game Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world doesn't end, and Dean's really, really okay with that.

When the gates of Hell and Heaven close, the Winchesters and their angel stand shocked in the aftermath.

It’s a relief, really, that they are all (more or less) in one piece: sure, Kevin has an IV pumping nutrients into him at the local hospital right now; and no, Sam will never be quite the same again, after all that internal trauma; and yes, Dean’s leg is fucking broken, again, for the second time in the last three years; and no, Cas will never be an angel again, even has a mild concussion at that very moment, but--but.

No more demons to creep out of Hell’s secret pathways; no more angels, interrupting their modest lives with holier-than-thou missions. As the dust settles, Dean grins, because yeah, he’s going to have to get his leg set and splinted and it hurts like a motherfucker, and Sam looks tired and worn and Cas looks just plain shell-shocked, but it’s over. The last ten years, all building and crescendoing out of control to this, and it’s done.

He’d thought he might feel purposeless, aimless, if he survived. Hell, he hadn’t even been planning on surviving until Cas plummeted out of Heaven and Sam set him straight.

Back to Wendigos, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters; back to spirits and ghosts, where demons were a rare thing, unusual to come across and rarer to fight; back to just hunting, and none of this save-the-world, epic-scale, horrible-catastrophe-Apocalypse crap. Dean can’t wait for the next time he staggers across a monster of old that he hasn’t seen in far too long. No crusades, no missions, just--Hell, maybe he’ll even get a day job, make a good enough fake identity and become a mechanic or a bartender, stop hustling pool and poker and only hunt on the weekends.

“What’re you smiling about?” Sam comments, bemused, and Dean just lurches forward on his good leg and hugs his brother, hard, before turning to kiss Cas, who still looks a little dazed by it all. The concussion probably doesn’t help.

His leg takes two months to heal: worse this time than the last he’d been laid up, and he can’t believe, in all his time as a hunter, that he’s broken so few bones. He gets restless after only a few days in the cast, but he’s content enough to sit around the bunker, helping Sam field phone calls from the network of hunters that Garth shares with them now. Garth has a lot of ideas about dividing up the United States into zones and situating hunters in each one, so that some of the men and women who had been on the road for decades can settle down.

“I don’t know how you even deal with these guys, Garth,” Dean says over the phone, about two weeks after the last battle went down. “We’re anti-social by nature.”

“War breeds strange bedfellows,” Garth says cheerfully. “You guys can have the bunker and surrounding 500 miles--no further than a day’s drive. S’long as one of you’s always at home base to help with the phones and the research. You’ve got a better library than anybody in the biz.”

They don’t hunt much, in the weeks that follow; if there’s a case in their jurisdiction, Sam and Cas take care of it, Dean left behind thanks to his leg and Garth’s (unfortunately smart) rules. After a scrape with a Leviathan--they’re still out there, kicking around, annoying bastards even without Dick Roman--Sam comes back to the bunker white-faced, and Cas immediately vanishes into Dean’s room.

“How’d it go?” Dean asks as Sam sits down across from him at the war table, still sweaty and pale.

“I can’t do it anymore, Dean,” Sam says, with the tone of a reluctant confession. “I’m sorry, I just--I want to help, but I can’t hunt.”

“No problem,” Dean says, flicking to the next page in a directory on vampire bastardizations. “Once I’ve got my leg back, me and Cas’ll handle the hunting. Garth can cover our jurisdiction until then.”

Sam pauses, eyeing Dean warily across the table. “You--what?”

Dean closes the book and looks up at his brother, who’s staring at him warily. “You don’t want to hunt, then, you’re done. No big. You can handle the phone calls or the research or--you know, be a Man of Letters, Sam. Not a hunter.”

“You’re serious,” Sam says, his voice breaking. “No questions asked? Just like that?”

“Think we’ve done our time,” Dean points out, feeling his mouth quirk up at the corner despite the way Sam’s eyes suddenly gleam wet, the way his features slump in something like relief--and Dean has seen tension there so often, so constantly, that he didn’t know that Sam could exist without it. “Should be able to do whatever the Hell we want, right? Hey, if you wanna--I mean, Amelia, she’s--”

But then Sam’s striding around the table and bending down to wrap Dean in a hug so fierce that it chokes him of breath, cutting off his words. He feels Sam’s sudden hitched breath, the cutoff of a sob, and holds on, smiling.

“I want to stay,” Sam says when he’s pulled back, jaw set in a determined line. “Decision was kinda final, with Amelia, and even if it wasn’t, I’d--I’d wanna stay.”

Dean nods, his voice a little croaky when he says, “Good.”

Kevin, it turned out, can’t handle civilian life after the last two years, and moves into the bunker with them to help Sam with research. He shows up at the door totally spooked, had only tolerated a few weeks back at college after his hospitalization before he turned tail and ran. Sam gives him back the room he’d stayed in during those weeks leading up to the final showdown, and they spend their days sequestered in the library and the war room, cataloging and archiving and generally being nerds together.

Charlie comes by to visit pretty often, and occasionally takes cases with Cas if Garth can’t spare anyone while Dean’s leg heals.

“You’re missing out, old man,” she says teasingly, one late night after a run-in with a vengeful spirit, as he warms up dinner for her and Cas. Dirty and sweaty, exhausted but whole, the two got back to the bunker just after midnight. She looks happy--a little muddy, but pleased with herself.

“Shut up,” he grumbles, ruffling her hair as he drops a plate of lasagna in front of her. “Glad you two had fun.” He presses a kiss to the top of Cas’s head as he pushes a larger plate of lasagna to the fallen angel. “It has vegetables in it,” he promises, and Cas smiles up at him, a little tick up of his lips that is especially subtle and just for Dean.

“You guys are sickening,” Charlie says, sticking her tongue out at Dean as he wobbles and drops into his chair beside Cas, still cursing the plaster over his leg. “I can crash here tonight, right?”

“No,” Cas deadpans. “You should drive another hundred miles to your apartment at one in the morning.”

Charlie snickers. “Thanks, Cas.”

And of course, there’s Cas.

He takes well enough to humanity, even though sometimes he still forgets to eat regularly or that he can’t sit still indefinitely without his muscles hurting anymore. He still loves burgers, and takes to running with Sam in the mornings, even though the youngest Winchester usually has to drag him out of bed to do so, an hour after Dean’s already awake and done with breakfast. Cas hates mornings, and loves coffee with enough cream and sugar to give a healthy man a heart attack. He swears in Enochian whenever he stubs his toe on a piece of sharp furniture, and speaking of toes, his feet are always cold.

Dean knows, because Cas worms those cold feet in between his calves every night for warmth and sighs blissfully before passing out.

Cas snores, too, but Dean can’t find it in himself to mind.

Their lives aren’t perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve all got issues, every single one of them, the worst of which is--

“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” Cas repeats dully, when Dean finally explains, in the middle of the night, why Cas is having nightmares about Purgatory--about his siege on Hell--about the civil war in Heaven--about the last decade, more or less.

“I still have nightmares about Hell,” Dean admits, and Cas, sitting across from him, cross-legged, on the bed, lets his forehead thunk down onto Dean’s shoulder where he stays. “It gets better,” Dean soothes. “Occupational hazard.”

“Of what?” Castiel asks, his voice muffled by Dean’s shirt. “Being a hunter?”

“No,” Dean corrects. “Being human.”

Cas and Kevin have the worst of it, because one’s new to being human and the other’s still new to the things that go bump in the night, and between the two of them, there are plenty of panic attacks and hallucinations to go around. For Sam--for Dean--this is old hat, routine. They deal, and sometimes they don’t sleep well, but most of the time, it’s better than how it used to be, and the bunker is warmer than any motel room when they wake up gasping from the memories that still flay them open sometimes.

There’s all that, but since their string of terrible luck is over, there’s also this.

Dean wakes up, and Cas’s eyes are closed on the pillow less than six inches from him. He’s breathing deeply, evenly, and his hair’s vertical from being rubbed on the sheets, a little longer than it used to be, a lot like that night in Pontiac when Dean stabbed him in the heart and he didn’t even blink. His scruff is three days old and dark against his pale skin, and he’s wearing one of Dean’s oldest t-shirts, and Dean thinks that of everything he could have wanted most in the world, he ended up with the thing he needed, too: this scruffy, socially awkward, angel-person sharing his bed, sticking his cold feet everywhere, blinking awake slowly to look back at Dean with blue, blue eyes.

There’s this: a slow, liquid smile as Dean leans in and kisses him, slow and deep, cradling the back of Cas’s head in his palm. There’s Cas’s reassuring weight, settling on top of him and between his legs, being careful not to nudge the cast. There’s little noises of pleasure pulled out of their throats and clothes moved hastily out of the way and the slow, slick slide of bodies together, and all the little things: the heat of Cas’s lips rolling into Dean’s mouth, the slide of a tongue against the seam of lips, the fingers digging into hip bones, the trace of old scars in Enochian against Dean’s tongue and the way Cas grips into his shoulder as tight as he did the day he raised Dean from Perdition. There’s a litany, a groan of names and curses and begging, and there’s the little shocked puff of air as the white-out of pleasure trips them over the edge before they’re even fully awake, and they grumble over the stickiness in the aftermath but they smile at each other anyway.

It’s all over, Dean thinks, and holds his angel tight, and listens to his brother making coffee in the distance, and Dean never thought he would want the opportunity to nest, to really have a home that included all the things that he loves, but here it is--and barring future Apocalypse, none of it’s going anywhere.


End file.
